Warden Technology
Wisconsin’s conservation wardens help protect and enhance our natural resources and teach the public about safe and wise use. One important aspect of being a warden is helping to eliminate poaching. Poaching is illegally hunting and killing wildlife. Wardens get to use a really cool variety of tools to help them catch poachers. Here’s some state-of-the-art technology that might be used to catch a crook:

• Night Scope: Night vision equipment allows wardens to see in almost total darkness. They can conduct surveillance of an area at night – when poachers or fish snatchers might be working.

• Black Light: If a warden finds an illegal trap and wants to find out who’s using it, he or she can spray the trap with an invisible substance that will stick to the poacher’s hands and show up under a black light. Then the warden can inspect the hands of people who have been in the area. If someone says he or she has never touched the trap but their hands glow, then the warden knows he or she is lying.

• Robodeer: Wardens use a special remote-controlled decoy to catch poachers who might be shooting off the road or hunting illegally some other way. Two wardens generally watch and control the decoy – one in a vehicle and one on foot. This way, they can go after the poacher more quickly. This decoy looks very realistic, especially from 100 yards or so, and there are small motors in the head and tail that can make movements look very lifelike.

• GPS: GPS stands for Global Positioning System and is a small, hand-held set that receives signals from satellites that are orbiting earth 12,000 miles up. GPS triangulates wardens’ exact locations on the planet in latitude and longitude. These are accurate within 10 or 20 feet. Wardens use GPS to mark sites of illegal traps or hunting stands. If a warden finds one of these, he or she can mark that latitude and longitude as a waypoint in his GPS receiver and come back to it later – even in the dark or from a different direction.

• Planes: Planes have a lot of uses for the Wisconsin Conservation Warden Force. From the air, they can see large areas of land, and they can monitor for things like night hunters, deer shiners, and boating enforcement.

• Laptop Computer: Wardens use their laptops in the field to do number checks on vehicle license plates, drivers’ licenses, and hunting or fishing licenses. If they see a car illegally parked on the side of the road and suspect that person is hunting, they can run the license plate number and find out who owns the car. Then they can see if that person has the right kind of hunting or fishing license for what he or she is doing.

Those are some pretty cool tools conservation wardens use to catch poachers, but they can’t be everywhere all the time, so if you see someone doing something wrong, call the wardens at 1-800-TIP-WDNR.